New Frontier of Censorship: Copyrighting People

Google-owned You Tube in brazen SOPA-style attack

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Thursday, May 3, 2012

An astounding new frontier of Internet censorship has been launched by Google-owned You Tube to copyright audio and visual characteristics of individual people, meaning third party companies could claim copyright ownership of content that doesn’t even belong to them if it features an individual person who has signed a partnership agreement with that company.

Last night we were informed that the account for the Alex Jones Channel on You Tube was not in good standing because the channel contained years-old videos of comedian Joe Rogan’s appearances on the Alex Jones Show.

Although the content exclusively belonged to the Alex Jones Show, You Tube claimed that the videos represented a copyright violation because its automated crawlers had determined that Rogan’s voice and image were under the sole copyright ownership of a company Rogan had partnered with called Bent Pixels.

Although Bent Pixels had previously used its own software to place ads on You Tube videos that contain exclusive Rogan content, You Tube began using its own automated software to determine which videos contained the image or voice of Joe Rogan, and then threatened legitimate content owners with community violations if the clips were not removed.

Not only our videos of Joe Rogan’s appearances on the Alex Jones Show but other Joe Rogan videos across You Tube were deleted on this pretext and channels were suspended.

This software has been applied across the You Tube platform, which is why hundreds of thousands of videos are now being deleted even though they clearly represent fair use or are even exclusive content which doesn’t even pertain to fair use.

• A D V E R T I S E M E N T
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This new definition of copyright violation completely blows away any pretense of fair use. Not only does it abolish fair use, it then allows third party companies to claim they own your personal content.

For example, if Rogan appeared on the Jay Leno show as a guest, a third party company could then claim they own that segment of Jay Leno’s broadcast.

Despite the fact that the bill was shot down, Google is already implementing SOPA-style policies under this framework of copyrighting individuals.

The heart of the problem lies with the fact that You Tube is now using automated applicationsthat can not only identify copyrighted music, but also individual voices.

As a result of You Tube treating Joe Rogan as a copyrighted individual, our long upload capability has been suspended and the entire channel itself, with over 200 million video views, is once again under threat of being deleted.

It is important to stress that You Tube is the culprit here, Bent Pixels is merely interested in protecting exclusive content of its partners, but You Tube has applied their own draconian copyright measures arbitrarily.

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